ABSTRACT

I am almost sure that you and I differ very widely in our opinions concerning Wordsworth’s talents, and perhaps more concerning his performances. My free, sincere, and utterly unbiassed sentiments I send you, not at all dreading your displeasure, because I hold a poet’s merits in higher estimation than you do. I know that when you engage me to review any work, it is my own judgment that you require me to exercise, and you do not expect that it shall always be in consonance with yours. I feel exceeding great reluctance to censure the works of a man of high and noble genius, however unworthy of him, because I am aware that the vivid imagination of poets, which I doubt not is always accompanied with equal self-complacency, often seduces them into errors which they know not to be such, but mistake them for excellencies of the purest order, when they are nothing but delirious wanderings from truth and nature. Yet it is hard to punish them for such follies, as if they had been guilty of crimes: lenity is not the character of any existing Review, nor are any of our periodical critics too lavish of praise. I hope that your readers will find as much rigour of censure in this article as will reconcile them to the warmth of commendation which I have most honestly and heartily bestowed on Wordsworth’s undeniable merits. The cry is up; and it is the fashion to yelp him down. I belong not to the pack, nor will I wag my tongue or my tail, on any occasion, to please the multitude. I am conscious of no personal partiality to prejudice me in favour of Wordsworth. I am sure the poetry of two men cannot differ much more widely than his does from mine. I hate his baldness and vulgarity of phrase, and I doubt not he equally detests the splendour and foppery of mine; but I feel the pulse of poetry beating through every vein of thought in all his compositions, even in his most pitiful, puerile, and affected pieces. To you I need not add that his frigid mention of my

name in his first note has not influenced me to speak more favourably of him than I otherwise should have done. It is a proud and almost contemptuous notice which he has taken of me and my ‘Daisy’ (I won’t change mine for his three daisies), and was more calculated to mortify and provoke a jealous temper than to soothe and disarm one who had the power and the opportunity to humble a rival in the eye of the public. No! I am persuaded, in my own mind, that I have done him justice to the best of my knowledge. I only regret that you will probably derive less satisfaction from the perusal of this essay than you might have done had our opinions been in perfect harmony. You must not be alarmed at the apparent length; for though the first four pages are closely written, the following ones are loose, and the whole will make no more, I believe, than eight of yours at the most. I confess that I tore myself from poetry to criticism, on this occasion, with excessive reluctance. My mind was so alive with images and sentiments connected with my West Indian Poem, that I did violence to my most favourite feelings to undertake this review. I hope nobody but you, and my own binding promise, could have moved me to do it. You will probably find that this article is written with more than usual stiffness; but indeed I could not help it. Only half of my heart was engaged in it, and the other half has been repining all the while at the interruption and loss of time. This is not often the case; but the poem on which I am at present engaged has so deeply and divinely interested me, that it has been great self-denial to suspend my meditations on it just at this time, when I am in the very heart of it. I intended to complete it, if possible, within this year, and I do not yet despair. I can, however, very conscientiously say, that, under these circumstances, I have done my utmost to serve you in the composition of this critique, and I have endeavoured to make the extracts as interesting as possible. I have plucked the most exquisite flowers in Wordsworth’s parterre to present to your readers. You yourself will not deny that some of these are very beautiful.